I think metaphors are mostly the effect of limitations.
Being humans, it’s how we understand things.

Some metaphors are so useful, we forget they are metaphors. We also build metaphors on top of metaphors on top of metaphors.

All useful. But, it’s when we forget something is a metaphor ultimately that we can lose sight. A constant danger.

Even if the couple of sentences I just wrote, there’s numerous metaphors. I don’t think we can really escape using them in some way.

Ultimately I think it goes to the whole “the finger that point the moon, isn’t the moon” idea. As long as we keep the representative nature of explanation (in stories and symbols), progress won’t stagnate.